Sunday, April 22, 2007

Shakespeare (and stuff)

I was surfing around a well-known torrenting site, for a reason forgotten, when I got the idea to do a search for one of my favourite shows, Slings and Arrows. And lo and behold, there I found all three seasons of it!

As I have mentioned before, one of the recurring events at the "local" library (it's like 20KM away...) is the sale of used books, dirt-cheap. This year I got a total of nine books; quite a few more than I had planned for since I was mainly looking at Iain Banks' The Bridge. But since it was three for one Euro, I also picked up Stanislaw Lem's Fiasco and Margaret Thatcher's book about her time as PM (yeah, I know).

Then I went to the library a while later, searching for books by a Japanese author, IIRC, and stumbled upon a table that I thought contained children's books, but in fact it contained fact-books and educational books: intriguing! So I had a good look and left with six books: Yrsa Stenius' Makten och Kvinnligheten ("The power and the femininity"), Swedish edition of Theodore Isaac Rubin's The Angry Book, Insight Guide: East Asia, Torsten Husén's Pedagogisk psykologi ("Pedagogical psychologi"), Swedish edition of Daniel Burstein's Yen! and finally a Swedish edition of Alexandre Dumas' Queen Margot.

Speaking of books, I recently relinquished a book from my own collection as a present for my cousin (since I hadn't bought anything and wouldn't know what he'd want were I to buy anything). The book in question was Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist, which has gotten much praise even though I found it relatively unremarkable myself. It was his 18th birthday, which we all know is something quite special (except in Japan, since the legal drinking age there is 20). Having decided it was best to take it easy, I went the whole evening on water and Coke. (Besides not having that much money to blow on drinks at the moment, the recovery-time from a night's drinking always seem to occupy a whole weekend.) But that didn't stop me from having fun as there was lots of dancing to be done.